


Disintegration

by sammyatstanford



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M, POV Second Person, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-08 01:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sammyatstanford/pseuds/sammyatstanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are moments you've always remembered. There are moments you want to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disintegration

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, there are no happy endings here.
> 
> I originally posted these separately on [Tumblr](http://sammyatstanford.tumblr.com/), but they were all sort of the same story in my head so here they are as one work.

You are twelve. He is perched in your lap, and you are teaching him the slap game. He still doesn’t know the truth, and you don’t want him to—never want him to—but you like to teach him these games that focus on speed, that train in reflexes.

You are bouncing him lightly on your knees, and you are letting your hands linger before pulling them away with a slow drag, pulling sticky-sweet triumphant smiles from his mouth, usually too serious for an eight-year-old. You want to smile back, but you remain serious, you maintain the illusion because he is already starting to know false victory, to know that you are biggerstrongerfaster and that winning is predicated on your kindness.

But you have always spent too much kindness on him, saved none for strangers.

His face is a mask of concentration, and his hands are resting under your hands, palm to palm, warm and tense and carrying the last hints of baby-pudge. As he slips them quickly out, palms sliding against yours, your knees bounce once, hard. Unprepared, he shrieks and falls off balance, colliding with your chest and laughing breathlessly, and you laugh, too. He pushes himself back up, fists pressed uncomfortably under your collarbones, and schools his face into a mask of seriousness.

“Dean,” he says, very flatly, and you think maybe he learned that tone from you. He is eight years old, and he does not have time for your shit.

You match his look. “Sam.” And then his lips are curling and his eyes are dancing and he is giggling again, forehead falling against your cheek. You curl a hand over his shoulder, grip it briefly, absorb his laugh and try to forget that Dad is a day late calling, forget that you will eat cold macaroni for dinner because there is a fridge but no microwave and the man at the front desk gives you the creeps and the nearest gas station is too far to walk.

“Dean,” he says again, and you realize you’ve been away, your hand on his shoulder too long, your gaze too far off, your expression more serious than he is supposed to see it. “Dean, it’s okay. I love you,” and he presses a warm, soft kiss to your lips where you have only ever kissed cheeks and foreheads and his fingers (when he was smaller but he doesn’t like that anymore).

“Sammy,” you say carefully.

“In the movies, when you love someone, that’s what you  _do_ , Dean.”

“Sammy,” you start again, “I love you, too, but we can’t kiss that way. We’re brothers.”

“So?” he insists, because that is what he does, press and prod and exasperate and distract you from worry with annoyance.

“So, brothers don’t…I mean, family, they don’t love each other like that. Family is different.”

“Well,” he says, crossing his arms in your hand-me-down sweatshirt that flops over his hands, “I don’t have anyone else to love. So. I love you.”

“I know you hate it, man, but you’ll understand when you’re older,” you reply, and then you flutter your fingers along his ribs until there are tears in his eyes and you hope he has forgotten that you have no one but each other.

Dad comes back the next day, but it’s only two weeks until he confronts you about Dad’s journal, and you can’t protect him from the truth anymore.

 ***

 You are eighteen. He is sitting at the kitchen table, his geometry text book open in front of him, but his eyes are focused upward on a moth, bumping again and again and again into the bare light bulb overhead. The bulb wobbles precariously in the cracked plaster around it where perhaps once an actual light fixture hung before this house went so far to shit that someone like John Winchester could afford to rent it. The shadow of the moth’s wings flickers over his face, his softly parted lips, the bob of his throat as he swallows.

“Sammy,” you say after a minute so long it is more than a minute, and it comes out soft, careful, quiet like this moment. His eyes flutter over to yours, eyelashes casting long shadows in the harsh light, a beat of wings against his cheekbones. “Homework, dude.” Like he needs reminding. Like he isn’t the one who has always cared, who has always focused and studied and worked while you fucked off and fucked girls and fucked up.

“Yeah, Dean,” he replies. Eyelashes down again. Flap flap.

You turn back to your magazine, breathe into the silence, trying to ignore the soft  _thumpwhooshthump_  of the moth striking, backing off, striking, but your fingers are curling tightly around the pages and you know you are about to take out every ounce of frustration you have over the holes in the screens and the broken bathroom door and the worthless air conditioning on its stupidly loud insect body.

But there is the scrape of chair legs, unnaturally loud in the stillness of the room. You turn your neck, tracking him to the kitchenette, and he comes back with one of those plastic cups you picked up at a fast food chain during a movie promotion, the pictures all faded now with washing and the rim bent weirdly from being crammed in the trunk as you move from place to place. He tears a piece of paper out of his notebook, folds it in half, climbs on the chair (which creaks sharply and wobbles worse than the bulb) and traps the little fucker against the ceiling. He slips the paper under the rim, eases his package down with care.

“Get the door, Dean?” he asks, turning to step down, and you see it happening as he shifts his weight, the legs of that piece-of-shit chair buckling and he is going down with it. You don’t actually see the fall, don’t hear a sound because you’re on your feet and there before you can blink, your eyes running frantically over pain-creased features.

“Sammy, you okay?” you say, and your hands are on his shoulders, his chest, sliding around to lift him towards you so you can feel his back.

“Dean,” he says, but you ignore it in favor of continuing your check of his bones. “ _Dean_. I’m okay. Just knocked the wind out of me.” His hand catches on your bicep and squeezes, strong, warm, reassuring.

“Yeah?” and you’re a little breathless, staring into his eyes for confirmation.

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes (brown today) locked on yours, and nodding firmly. You’re expecting the backtalk he’s become so fond of since he turned twelve (another thing he probably learned from you), but instead he laughs softly and murmurs, “Lost ‘im though,” and it takes you a full five seconds to remember the moth and why he was on the chair in the first place.

“Next time, we’ll try it my way.” You smirk, grab his upper arms to help pull him to his feet. He groans and sways a little, and you firm up your grip, give him a minute to find his equilibrium. He’s still a hand shorter than you, but he’s been catching up.

He laughs again, soft, wings his eyelashes down and glances away. “Okay, maybe my tailbone, too.”

“Broke your ass, Sammy?” and you’re grinning now, just on the edge of a taunt because you’re still too full of that Sammymaybehurt adrenaline to be too harsh.

“It’s Sam,” he responds automatically, eyes coming up to show you  _he means it_. But there’s a pause and then, “Dean,” and his voice is softened, quiet, and his fingers brush along your cheekbone. “Thanks,” and it’s a whisper you can’t hear over the  _thumpwhooshthump_  of your heartbeat in your ears, and you’re leaning forward to catch it and he leans forward and your lips catch against his. The kiss is warm and dry and he’s clearly done this before (because he’s learning from you) because he slants his lips ever-so-slightly to slide your mouths together and

The moth brushes your forehead. The touch flares against your senses and instinctively you’re pulling away, your eyes tracking where it lands on the wall and you smash your open palm against it, feel the final brush of its wings as it is crushed under your hand.

You’re staring at its mangled body in your palm, and then you’re looking up at him, and he’s touching his own mouth like he’s never known he had it (like he doesn’t run it all the damn time), and he is watching you like he’s never known about you either. He takes a step back he doesn’t even seem aware of, bumping the edge of the table.

You hold up the guts on your palm. “See, Sammy, my way,” you say, too loud, and you ignore the confusion in your voice as you turn and walk (definitely not run) to the bathroom. The sticky remains spiral down the drain, and then you catch your own reflection, reach out to touch the lips on your mirrored face like you’ve never known they were there, and you realize that they are curled up the slightest bit at the edges and what are you supposed to do with that?

You don’t know what to say but you can feel the almost sick throb of your heart and you’re turning and heading back into the living room and-

Sam is gone.

You stand there, heart hammering now, and then he’s coming back through the front door, dragging the oversize trash bin you always make him take to the curb on Tuesday mornings before school, and he kneels down to start stuffing the pieces of the broken chair inside. You step up to help him.

“I got it, Dean,” he says, voice sharp, not looking over his shoulder.

“Okay,” you say, and you walk back over to the armchair, sit down, pick up your magazine, stare at the page until your eyes blur.

 ***

You are a breath away from twenty-four, and you thought it was supposed to be warm in California. You’ve been much colder on your birthday, but 45 degrees is no peach when you spent Christmas in Beeville and the few days before New Year’s outside Flagstaff with some chick who had probably never cut her hair and liked to wrap it around…well, everything.

But he had asked, in one of his rare voicemails left on the phone you make sure to keep (three-quarters of them various points on the spectrum of tipsy to long-fucking-gone, another tenth just apologies for whatever was said the previous night), asked you to visit and you’re pretty sure he was mostly sober that time. And damn because you’d never known that kid to be a partier, but it seems like he really has become a college boy and taken after you (always learned it from you), and ain’t that a cryin’ shame.

You’d looked up the Stanford calendar (no matter what he liked to say about your computer-related abilities or lack thereof) so you know he’s out of school until the seventh, know from extrapolating his words that he is working barback at some place up the Bay because even he has realized that everything on his end is just a little  _too_  yuppie to deal with all the time. Even he must need a break from kids who wear plaid because it looks cool and not because flannel keeps you warm when you’re trapped unexpectedly overnight in an abandoned tunnel waiting to be predator or prey.

(You’ve got one so threadbare now that there’s hardly any point wearing it, but you keep it because you know he loved how soft it was when you threw it at him during your watch shifts, after he tossed and turned for twenty minutes, so he could ball it up, tuck it under his cheek as a pillow, and you always held back your shivering until he’d conked out.)

You’ve parked your baby on the street (and nothing better happen to her) and you duck around some guy who is way too layered-up for the weather, under his arm, and into a bar that’s a little more upscale than what you’re used to but not so off-putting that you’re ready to turn around and leave before you even get started.

Well, not because of the bar anyway.

There’s a smattering of people, but not too many this late on the Sunday after New Year’s, people who took a week off and partied a little too hard long since slunk off to their townhouses and studio apartments to finally get some sleep so they can go back to their perky little lives come Monday morning, people flush with the Niners earlier victory now home all snug in their civilian beds. There’s a handful of TVs showing highlights from the Clippers game, but your eyes are on the man standing behind the bar on the nearer end, back to the room, in a faded denim shirt stretched too tight over broad shoulders. A mountain of man that can’t be him because he can’t have transformed from your baby brother to this giant since he left.

But of course he could have. He’d gotten taller than you just before turning eighteen, and it’s been eighteen months since you last laid eyes on him, and you’d always carefully refrained from letting Dad know you knew about his little trips to sunny California so you never got to ask questions.

Your heart rate jacks up alarmingly, but at the same time you feel your lungs expand like it’s the first breath you’ve ever taken, a weight you’ve become so accustomed to you didn’t even know you were carrying it anymore—gone. Because he is here, he is upright, his stupid hair is brushing his big stupid shoulders, he’s filled out like he’s eating well and he’s working some two-bit job just like you taught him and maybe you should just turn around and leave now because he is utterly perfect, and you can only ruin him.

But—the voicemail.

So you inhale, marvelously full and deep, and you blow it out through your lips as you count out the eight steps it takes to bring you up next to him, blink too long with your hand on the back of the barstool, pull it out, lean up against the worn oak of the bar. He’s bent over, restocking, pulling bottles out of a box and shoving them into a cooler, but as soon as you’re there (peripheral vision as good as ever), he’s standing and turning, saying, “Hey, last call’s coming up, so what—”

His words die in his throat, his mouth hanging open.

“Heya, Sammy.” You’re smiling, you know it’s spread stupid big across your face, just like you know there is nothing you can do about it.

He looks good. All sunned up even in the winter because he walks everywhere and he was always too warm for winter clothes until December anyway, unless you were staying in some shithole in the Midwest with no heater, so cold at night you’d share a bed just so you could pool the meager blanket supply.

“Dean?” he asks, his voice one of intense disbelief, but you can hear underneath it a current of denied hopes coming true, like when you’d gotten him that magic kit for his thirteenth birthday that he had mentioned once but never again because it hurt too much to ask and be told no over and over. And then his face splits open on a grin, all white teeth and dimples, and you didn’t even know you were aching to see it until it’s there in front of you.

Your eyes feel tight.

“Dean!” he says again, and this time it’s all excitement, and you’re standing there, feeling some forgotten energy humming in your blood, and he’s humming back, smiles burning into each other, and then he’s reaching across the bar and pulling you forward by the lapels of your jacket, right into his smile. Your heart actually feels like it’s stopped as he tucks his face to the side of yours, one arm around you in an awkward, stretched-over-the-bar hug. You close your eyes and press your nose into his neck and breathe in the smell of his sweat, your hand clasping his wrist where his hand’s still locked onto the collar of your jacket.

He pulls back quickly, looking sheepish. “Sorry,” his says, hand in his hair and eyelashes down and he’s eight and eleven and fourteen and seventeen and three-quarters  _Dean_  so can you just leave me alone because I am a fucking adult? all over again, every moment you’ve seen him is etched into your brain like sulfuric acid and you’re dizzy with a sudden ache to get him under your arm and drag him out to the Impala and never let him leave ever ever ever ever ever again.

But you promised yourself, again and again, that you would not mention it, not once, and so you grin back at him at say, “You look good, Sammy,” because it’s a truth you can speak.

His eyes dart up, and you can see it on his face that he hasn’t heard that nickname in near eighteen months (save a few voicemails of your own), and like a habit he opens his mouth to tell you off, but like a dream he closes it again.

“What are you—” he starts, but then someone’s calling his name from other end of the bar (you’d look but you can’t seem to move your eyes), and he’s calling something back over his shoulder. He turns back. “You hangin’ around for a minute?”

“Yeah, Sammy, yeah,” you say, “of course,” and he nods and flashes those dimples again.

“Cool, I’ll be off soon, let me get you a drink,” all rushed out, like he still can’t believe you’re here to hear it, and then he grabs you an El Sol and pops it open, passes it to you over the bar.

“Yeah, man, I’ll be here, go do your…whatever.” You wave your hand in a go-away gesture and sit, pulling off the beer.

He moves down the bar, all length and more grace than you’ve seen him with since he was twelve and hadn’t started to grow, and you let yourself look for a slow count of three before you close your eyes, turn your head away so that when you open them again he’s only in your periphery.

You drink your beer, watch SportsCenter, hope no one asks you how the Giants ended up losing because you’re not watching it at all.

He’s supposed to help clean up after close, but he’s smiled his way out of it and now you’re following him down the street to the apartment he’s staying in for the break since the dorms are closed—a friend of a friend’s who goes to SFU but is out of town with family. You hate to leave your baby but he assures you if you’ve found a spot you better keep it, it’s only a seven-minute walk anyway. You don’t talk about hunting, he doesn’t talk about school, but somehow you’re filling the silence and he keeps smiling at you, bright and sincere in way you hadn’t seen in a while even before he left you behind.

The apartment is small, bed in one corner, kitchen in another, the only other door leading to a bathroom with a shower so tiny you don’t know how he fits, but you’re used to it and so is he, so you toss your duffel by the couch as he heads to the fridge and pulls out two beers, passing one over to you and then leaning back against the island.

“It’s really good to see you, Dean.”

“You, too, Sammy,” you reply, knocking your bottle against his and then taking a long drink because the shine of the situation is starting to wear off, and you’re realizing that you don’t know what to say to him besides  _why?_  and  _how could you?_  and  _is it all as perfect as you dreamed?_ and other things that touch on topics neither of you are interested in discussing.

“I…I really missed you, man,” he says after a pause, eyes on the floor and drinking half his beer in one go.

“Yeah.” You take another drink.

He looks up at you, and there is a fleeting ghost of some hidden pain in his eyes that makes you immediately tense up, but then he shakes it away and says, “Hey, wanna watch a movie?” and you agree, because at least it won’t be so quiet or maybe because this is something that used to be familiar and you hope is easy to fall back into.

He heads over to the couch, and you finish your beer in one long gulp, toss it in the trash, go to grab another because (you’ve been drinking a lot since he left) two beers in an hour doesn’t really do anything for you anymore. There’s a half-empty bottle of Jack on the counter, not even in the cabinet, two glasses sitting on the drain board. There’s soda in the fridge, but no cans in the trash.

You pull out another beer for him, too, and you flop down next to him on the couch, pass it off, notice that he opens it immediately, don’t say anything.  _The Searchers_  is on, only about twenty minutes in, and you’ve both seen it a dozen times but who says no to  _The Searchers_ , so you ease into the sofa, let your arm fall across the back as Ethan leaves the funeral and heads after the Comanches. You exchange a few offhand comments about how John Wayne is a badass and Laurie is a babe, but sometime during her narration of Martin’s accidental purchase you notice that he’s fallen asleep, head tipped toward you and breathing soft and even. You smirk, because he’s probably been up since dawn getting his pens ready for class on Tuesday, and turn back to the movie, because you don’t sleep so well these days yourself.

When Debbie’s asking Ethan to leave without her, he shifts, his head landing against your hand, hair tossed through your fingers, soft and fine and  _totally like a girl’s_ , you should remind him tomorrow. Carefully, you pick up your hand, slide it through his hair again. He snuffles and you freeze, but he just unconsciously presses his head more firmly into your fingers, so you do it again. And again as you watch Ethan and Martin escape the Comanche attack, as you remember watching this movie with him when you were fifteen, promising him that if anyone ever shot him with an arrow, you’d fix him up just like Martin, as long as he promised not to scalp you later no matter what.

By the time the cabin door shuts on Ethan, your hand is splayed against the back of his neck, thumb rubbing light circles against the vertebrae there, a touch that you haven’t had since he turned sixteen, but still so familiar that it feels easy and natural. You sit up, slide closer to wake him up and get him in bed so you can sprawl out on the couch, but when you look at him you realize he’s watching you with half-open eyes and huh, how long has he been awake?

You start to pull your hand away, but he’s turning his head and pressing his cheek into your palm, and you have no control over the thumb that slides over his cheekbone roughly, once, twice, before you’re curling your fingers into his hair, resting them against the hinge of his jaw.

“Dean,” he says, whisper soft, and you feel it vibrate in his throat, “why did you come?”

You tighten your fist in his hair, pull a little, want him to feel it like you feel it, the pull that means you can never stay away. “You asked.”

His eyelids flutter like a nod of acknowledgment, and when his eyes open again they are  _open_ , too vulnerable for you to prevent the hitch somewhere deep in your chest.

“You’d come back again?” he asks, and you open your mouth to say “Always, anytime, anything” but then he’s moving, trapping the exhalation in your lungs with his mouth, and you’ve got both hands in his hair now, pulling him closer as your eyes fall shut, parting your lips and inviting him in.

Hands are on your shoulders, pushing off your jacket as you dig your fingers into his shoulders, and then his palm is resting against your neck, big enough to spread from the dip of your collarbone and wrap nearly around to the other side as he tears his mouth away from yours and spreads heat down the side of your throat, teeth closing just above the collar of your t-shirt. His other hand plays down your side, under your shirt and then back up the scale of your ribs, striking each one lightly like he’s making music, and as a groan escapes your lips, you realize he sort of is.

“Sam,” you gasp, and he pulls back quickly, too quickly, and you can see the immediate flare of panic in his eyes like a spirit has just appeared behind you and it’s too late to get out a warning, like those beers were two hours ago and he knows they’re not an excuse. But you just say, “Bed,” and he collapses back against you, hand sliding from your neck to grasp at your shirt and haul you to your feet (okay, he definitely has not let himself get out of shape), and then he’s all but tearing your flannel off your shoulders, fisting into your t-shirt, and you’re starting to feel a little slow to this party, so you slip your fingers between his belt and waistband, pulling him flush up against you, biting at his lower lip and then sucking it into your mouth, shuddering at his low moan you can feel vibrating in your chest.

You know your hands start working at his belt buckle, but your brain is kind of melting because before you think you’ve breathed his shirt is hanging off of one arm and you’re sliding your hands under his wife beater, over the stomach you’ve seen a thousand and one times, pulling the shirt over his head and you’d be ashamed at the noise you make when his skin touches yours (when precisely did you lose your t-shirt?) if the same sound weren’t echoing at you from his mouth, and then you’re falling back onto the bed with your jeans halfway down your thighs and he’s sprawled out next to you with one hand in your pants, the other pulling your mouth to his by the pendant he gave you, and you have the good sense to shove down his boxers before you lose complete track of your brain in a way that has really, sincerely never happened to you before no matter what anyone likes to think.

And you want to remember everything but it’s not one moment of whiting out, it’s an era of it, nothing but panting and groaning and perfect painful kisses and unbearable friction until the world fractures and spins like a kaleidoscope, a thousand thousand colors as you come over his fist, your heart so high and tight you’re not sure how it’s beating and only getting higher when you hear his desperate, “Dean,  _Dean_ ,” as he spills into your hand.

You lay there, staring at him as he stares at you, panting easing to erratic breathing easing to something slow and blissed out, and his fingers come up to brush against the fringe of sweaty hair cooling against your forehead, before he wipes his dirty fingers against his jeans and wriggles out of them. You do the same, and then he’s pulling up the blankets that got kicked to the bottom of the bed and pulling you up against his chest, curling his head over yours.

“Sammy,” you whisper because you don’t know what else to say as you tuck your chin against his chest, and you feel a smile against the top of your head, but before you can go on, sleep sneaks up on you in a way it hasn’t in months.

When you wake up, the light filtering through the gauzy curtains is the grey of early dawn, and he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from you.

“Sam?” you ask, voice sleep-rough, and you see his shoulders tense, and that’s all it takes for your stomach to turn over.

“You should go,” he says, face in his hands.

You sit up, “Sam,” you start, reaching out, resting your fingers in the spaces between his ribs.

“No, you need to go.” It’s trying to be hard, trying to be cold. He shakes off your touch.

“Sam—”

“I can’t—I can’t—”

And you want to say  _can’t what_  and you want to say  _you started it_  and you want to laugh and you want to scream but it’s all caught reverberating around in your hollow chest as you climb off the bed, grab your jeans where you’d dropped them hours before, pull them on. Do up your belt, find your shirt, put on your jacket, grab your duffel.

You give yourself to the count of six to start walking, but on four you’re turning back to him. “Sam,” and it’s the big brother tone, the one he’s trained to respond to no matter what, and he pulls his hands away and stares up at you with red eyes, the half-moons of his nails pressed into his cheek and forehead.

“This—,” you start, “I—anything you want, I can give you anything you want,” and you’ve never come this close to begging unless it was for someone’s life.

“This is what I want,” he replies, and it’s a lie, you’ve heard him tell a hundred, so you know, but just like he’s fifteen and he’s got candy that you know he stole, you can’t make him tell the truth. So fine, he wants pain, he can take it and fuck him and fuck everything and fuck you especially for being so goddamn stupid.

“Don’t make me do this,” you say like it’s a statement but you know you’re asking, asking like you haven’t asked for anything in so long.

But he looks back down at the floor.

And you count to four this time.

And you walk out, left arm wrapped around your chest to hold your right, to hold yourself together, as the apartment door shuts behind you.


End file.
